Chapter 15
In This Chapter
● Meeting the great capitalists
● Checking out the progress of women and working people
● Walking down the factory aisle toward the modern corporation
● Stepping up on the international stage
The time between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898 was the longest period of peace in U.S. history, and America used the time to grow. New inventions transformed the country. Industry, pushed originally by flamboyant capitalists, began to take on the look of modern big business. Women and working people also fought to make progress. Blacks endured endless persecution, but they weren’t slaves anymore. Lost causes like the Populist Party and protests by laborers and farmers sowed the seeds for later reform.
As the United States grew more powerful, it got a bigger role to play in the world. The country that started as colonies becoming independent ended up fighting Spain to take over its colonies and, a little embarrassed, eventually set those colonies free. The United States became strong and stable enough to help lead the world into the 1900s. This chapter gives you the rundown on what happened during those years.
Social Change in the Gilded Age Scramble
Some see the time after the Civil War as a time of complacency, when the U.S. caught its breath and concentrated on making money and inventing things. Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age for a reason. Even though the pace of change slowed down, people who saw injustice often worked to improve society.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1866.
Human beings got some protection, too, when the American Red Cross began in 1881 under Clara Barton, a beloved nurse from the Civil War.
The Anti-Saloon League (1893) won some temporary victories, but Prohibition, when it came in 1919, lasted little more than a decade (see Chapter 17).
Separate but not equal
Politics didn’t help blacks in the closing years of the 1800s. They weren’t slaves anymore, but society was still holding them down. According to the chilling phrase used until the 1960s, keeping blacks “in their place” meant, for many Southern whites, that blacks would be kept poor, segregated, and unable to vote. Blacks were forbidden to mix with whites in Southern schools, buses, trains, and parks by Jim Crow laws (1890). These laws also erected phony literacy tests and poll taxes to keep blacks from voting.
Despite many challenges, Jim Crow laws were finally cleared away only by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. An early attempt to appeal to the Supreme Court, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), failed when the court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities were legal under the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling was a good day for the segregationist South but a bad day for justice. (See Chapter 26 for the best Supreme Court rulings). The lives of blacks were separate but almost never equal. Just to make sure blacks and their Northern supporters were too frightened to fight back, whites lynched more than 1,000 blacks during the 1880s and 1890s.
Question: What was the significance of the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)?
Answer: The decision said that “separate but equal” public facilities were okay under the civil-rights laws.
Blacks were left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and they did so:
● Booker T. Washington (1885) taught hundreds of blacks to make a living at his Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His Atlanta Compromise Speech (1895) called for blacks to better themselves through education even while they remained separate but linked to whites, like the individual fingers of a hand. Blacks mostly attended special black colleges until they began to be admitted to traditionally white institutions in the 1960s.
● George Washington Carver (1900) became a respected agricultural chemist who publicized many uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes at a time when the South needed a crop to replace cotton.
● W E. B. Du Bois (1910) got a PhD from Harvard and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
● Writer Paul Dunbar made the literary world appreciate the experience of blacks through poetry and dialect in Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896).
Question: What did Booker T. Washington support in his Atlanta Compromise Speech?
Answer: He favored black self-help and separate but cooperative development with whites.
Deating with change on the railroads
Railroads were so important that they actually changed the time. Before the 1880s, every major city had its own local time, based on calling it noon when the sun was right over city hall. Noon in Philadelphia was a few minutes later than noon in New York; when the clocks in St. Louis said 11:50, the clocks in Chicago said noon. This customized time didn’t matter much in the days of stagecoaches, but railroads needed to run on schedules that everybody understood. In 1883, the major railroads laid out four time zones for the United States; these time zones are still basically what Americans set their watches by today.
The year 1877, when the last federal troops protecting blacks were withdrawn from the South, was a bad time for many white railroad workers. The four largest railroads in the United States cut their pay by 10 percent. When union members went on strike, federal troops were called in to break up the picket lines. In the fighting that followed, more than 100 people died.
Chinese workers also had problems. After they finished building the Central Pacific railroad west from Sacramento, the jobs for low-paid Chinese far outnumbered those for other workers. When the Chinese population of California reached nearly 10 percent of the state total, jobless white residents launched violent attacks against the competitive Asians.
Under pressure, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), barring all further settlement from China; this first law to limit national immigration stayed in effect for 60 years. Some exclusionists even tried to take away the citizenship of Chinese born in the United States, but the Supreme Court slapped them down in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), saying that all people born in the United States are citizens.
Progressing with the immigrants
Immigrants brought progress as well as strong backs. They were willing to challenge entrenched interests, if necessary, to better working conditions. Most immigrants came from European towns and farms, and some newcomers took the money they earned and went back to their home countries. Almost half the Italian immigrants returned to Italy; perhaps 20 percent of other immigants went back home in the 1800s.
The new Americans who stayed had help from urban settlement houses like Jane Addams’ Hull House (1889) in Chicago and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement (1893) in New York. Florence Kelley worked at both places and for 40 years led the fight for the welfare of ordinary people. Reformers slowly got laws passed to improve the treatment of the poor.
Question: From what social and economic background did most late-1800s immigrants come?
Answer: They came mostly from rural and small-town Europe.
Giving the women's-rights movement a boost
In 1820, the United States didn’t have a single female college graduate. By 1900, however, one out of every four college graduates was a woman.
The women’s-rights movement got a platform in Women and Economics (1898), written by feminist thinker Charlotte Gilman. Gilman said that women have no biological differences that necessarily keep them from full participation in the world. She called for child care and takeout food 100 years before fast food and drop-off preschool became available to working parents.
In 1890, pioneer feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony passed on the torch of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 (see Chapter 12) by founding the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. Women cleverly linked their role in the family with getting the vote. The concept had its roots in republican motherhood (see Chapter 10), but the arguments were now both clear and not about to go away.
Hull House hero Jane Addams said men were as sloppy at running government as they were in the home and that voting needed a woman’s touch. Carrie Catt said the growth of city life meant that women couldn’t confine caring about the future of their families to their houses: Family life now extended into the community, and women needed to be represented there. The movement gained strength; most Western states allowed women to vote even before the passage of the women’s suffrage amendment in 1920.
The AP exam will include questions on women’s rights and other social issues. Knowing the names of the primary leaders of these movements in the 1880s will help your score. At minimum, remember from the women’s movement Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. From the black freedom movement, keep in mind W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. For labor (discussed later in this chapter), remember Samuel Gompers, Eugene V. Debs, and Terence Powderly.
Educating the population
The Morrill Act of 1862 (see Chapter 14) provided money from the sale of public land to state universities; the Hatch Act of 1887 added agricultural experimentation and education to the government-funded mix. College and high school graduation both tripled between 1870 and 1900, although those increases still meant that only 6 percent of the U.S. population stayed in school long enough to get a high-school diploma.
Bicycles: Providing transportation for everyone
Before the automobile, bicycles set people free. Riders could tear along on dangerous-looking high-wheel bikes at speeds that are hard to reach today. “Safety bicycles,” with two equal wheels like the ones we ride today, made riding the rage for both men and women. By 1893, the United States had as many bicycles as horses.
Arts and Entertainment, Late-19th-Century-Style
Greater education meant greater interest in reading and in entertainment in general. Newspapers grew as most people learned to read. The invention of the linotype (1885), which automatically set type for newpapers, caused papers to get cheaper and more colorful.
The Associated Press, founded in the 1840s, allowed newspapers all over the world to share stories from reporters on the scene. Unfortunately, newspapers sometimes resorted to sensational and often misleading yellow journalism (1895) to grab readers. The term yellow journalism comes from an early color newspaper comic strip featuring a character called the Yellow Kid.
The rise in newspapers also led to a boost in literature and in access to public interest in art and music, because news on these items was suddenly more public. I cover these topics in more detail later in this chapter. Following are some other notable achievements in art and entertainment:
● Henry Richardson designed massive civic buildings decorated with Gothic arches.
● The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 presented the dream of a beautiful future city and sold enough tickets to admit almost half of the population of the United States.
● Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (1885) brought cowboys and Indians to the world, including the crack shot Annie Oakley.
● The Barnum and Bailey Circus hit the road in 1881.
● Professional baseball got its start in the 1870s; college football was big by the 1880s; and basketball was invented by YMCA instructor James Naismith in 1891.
Literature leading to action
Civil War General Lew Wallace thought that Christianity needed defending from attacks by Darwinists (see Chapter 14), so he wrote a moving book called Ben-Hur (1880) that became, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a best-selling international hit. The book’s main character, Judah Ben-Hur, accidentally injures a high-ranking Roman commander, for which he suffers a life of punishment, only to be redeemed in the end by an encounter with Jesus. Ben-Hur was the first work of fiction to be blessed by the pope.
Following are other notable authors and works of the period:
● Low-profile but still beloved was Emily Dickinson (1886), whose poetry still moved people despite the fact that she hardly left her home.
● Henry James (1889) used authentic characters to explore the world of Americans, Europeans, and even women’s rights in Daisy Miller and The Bostonians.
● California writers brought fresh Western ideas:
• Jack London wrote about nature in The Call of the Wild (1903).
• Frank Norris took on the railroad monopoly in The Octopus (1901).
• Theodore Dreiser pioneered social realism with Sister Carrie (1900).
● Upton Sinclair created public uproar with his novel The Jungle, a muckraking expose of the meatpacking industry.
● Jacob Riis took pictures that changed society’s view of the poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890). His book led a young police commissioner named Teddy Roosevelt to close dangerous flophouses.
Question: What was Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives?
Answer: The book was a photographic study of poverty in New York in the 1890s.
Artists and music
Music and art grew in popularity. Now competing with photographers, artists mixed feeling with realism:
● Thomas Eakins (1895) ignored Victorian fashion to paint a world he considered beautiful beyond the need for idealization.
● Winslow Homer (1890) painted life near the sea in beautiful watercolors.
● Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1890) made moving sculpture, including memorializing the heroics of blacks in the Civil War.
Symphony orchestras and opera houses were founded in major American cities in the late 1800s. As black musical traditions merged with white folk music, “ragged music” became ragtime, spirituals became blues, and rhythm became jazz (and, eventually, rock-and-roll).
A Presidential Do-Si-Do
Although the plump, stuffy, walrus-mustached presidents who ran the country from the Civil War to the end of the 1800s may not seem very heroic, their very lack of conflict gave the nation time to heal and grow.
James Garfield, Chester Arthur, and William McKinley
James Garfield didn’t get to be president long; he was shot in the back by a crazy guy from one of the factions in Garfield’s own Republican Party. After that, even the corruption-challenged Republicans had had enough.
With the help of Chester Arthur, a newly reformed vice president turned president, Republicans surprised even themselves by passing the Magna Carta for civil-service reform, the Pendleton Act (1883). This law required people to have qualifications and pass tests to get government jobs. Extorting political “contributions” from government workers became illegal, even if the president had appointed them.
William McKinley got to preside over the Spanish-American War and the annexation of Hawaii at the turn of the 20th century. He rolled back civil service reforms to benefit his own Republican party. Civil-service reform was great, but it had two drawbacks:
● Politicians couldn’t fire incompetent government employees who had slipped through the system.
● Because elected officials couldn’t pay back political contributors with jobs, these politicians had to pay them back with legislation.
Grover Cleveland
The voters thanked the Republicans for finally getting honest by electing a Democrat for the first time since the Civil War. Grover Cleveland was no Progressive, but he was honest. He vetoed a bill to provide seeds to drought-stricken farmers. “Although the people support the government,” he said, “the government should not support the people.”
Cleveland lowered the tariff to save citizens money on imported goods and force American manufacturers to compete. The big industrialists didn’t like competing. In the next election, they raised a war chest and managed to beat Cleveland by a few votes. It was the first big-business-money election in American history; many more would follow.
Benjamin Harrison
The businessmen got what they paid for. New Republican President Benjamin Harrison pushed through the highest tariff bill ever passed, the McKinley Tariff Act (1890). The McKinley bill set a record by taxing the average import almost 50 percent. As an example, this tax made an imported coffeepot worth $10 cost $15.
U.S. industrialists were delighted because they had less competition. U.S. manufacturers could raise their protected prices and make more profit. Regular people couldn’t help noticing they were paying high prices for both imported and protected domestic goods.
The return of Grover Cleveland
Voters took most of the seats away from the Republicans in the House of Representatives and brought honest Grover Cleveland back again — the only president to win reelection after being out of office.
While Cleveland was making his comeback in the 1892 election, the new Populist Party managed to get more than 1 million votes. The party’s platform called for a graduated income tax, government ownership of railroads and telephones, the direct election of U.S. senators, an eight-hour workday, and immigration reform. They never elected a president, but the Populists saw much of their program become law. The Populists also tried to help the Southern blacks, which made white Southerners angry. The whites tightened the Jim Crow laws so that almost no blacks got to vote in the South.
Cleveland had to face the Depression of 1893, the worst economic downturn of the 1800s. Strapped for cash to run the government, he turned to J.P. Morgan, the richest banker in the country. Morgan and his banker friends came up with the money, but they charged a commission of more than 10 percent. In the face of economic troubles, Cleveland couldn’t get the tariff reductions he had promised through Congress, and the Republicans took control again in the next election.
Getting Down to Business
The United States went from also-ran to Number One among the manufacturing nations of the world in the 30 years after the Civil War. This amazing growth was based on profits, people, and products:
● The Civil War was terrible where the bullets were flying, but the North came through with almost no destruction and a lot of money earned by supplying the army. It invested much of that profit in new businesses.
● People kept coming to America. Many of them were hard workers willing to put in 12-hour days if that’s what it took to move their families up the economic ladder.
● The United States almost burst with inventive ingenuity, creating new products like Alexander Bell’s telephone (1876), the typewriter, the cash register, and the electric streetcar. Thomas Edison’s electric light (1879), combined with the distribution system he designed to power it, changed the world. Before bright lights, people used to sleep at night. Edison also invented the phonograph (ancestor of the MP3 player) and the movies that led to DVDs.
The rise of the millionaire businessman
Ambitious businessmen learned how to take advantage of all this profit, people, and product innovation; that’s how they became rich.
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (1890) ran a steelmaking operation that proved the power of vertical integration — controlling everything you need to make a product. Carnegie miners dug iron ore out of frozen northern Minnesota and loaded it onto Carnegie ships, which steamed across the Great Lakes to Carnegie trains, which took the ore to Carnegie blast furnaces running night and day in Pittsburgh.
Carnegie also helped fund thousands of public libraries, thus spreading “the poor people’s university” all over the country. Carnegie wrote The Gospel of Wealth, a book that said rich people had a responsibility to spend their money in a way that would help poor people better themselves. By 1920, the United States had thousands of free public libraries — more than in the rest of the world combined — and half of them were built with help from Carnegie.
John D. Rockefeller
Using a different approach, John D. Rockefeller (1885) built Standard Oil into a company by using horizontal integration — controlling all the outlets for selling a product. Standard Oil drove retail and wholesale competitors out of business. Rockefeller said, “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.”
Rockefeller did whales an unexpected favor when he organized Standard Oil in 1870: The kerosene he made from petroleum gave much better light than the expensive whale oil that people had previously burned in lamps. Cans of kerosene from Standard Oil were invariably one of the first American products to arrive as U.S. commerce spread all over the world. Electric lights soon made kerosene obsolete, but freeways would lead to other uses for oil.
J.P. Morgan
J.P. Morgan (1895) controlled banks he didn’t even own with interlocking directorates, using people who shared seats on many boards of directors. When a group of businesses conspired to fix prices, it was called a trust.
North Versus South in manufacturing and tobacco
The South took a long time to do much manufacturing; it was farther behind the North in industrialization in 1900 than it had been before the war. Even making cloth from cotton lagged in the South; although Southerners had built a few textile mills by 1900, two-thirds of the cloth was still being made in the North.
The only good thing for the South was bad for people: The invention of the cigarettemanufacturing machine in the 1880s got Americans smoking in a big way. The machine meant more tobacco production and a cigarette-manufacturing industry for the South.
Breaking in against Northern firms on established products was tough. Birmingham, Alabama, just happened to have iron ore, coal, and limestone all close to town — perfect for making steel. Northern railroads slowed this competition on behalf of their Pittsburgh steelmaking buddies by charging Birmingham steelmakers inflated shipping rates, as though they were sending their steel from Pittsburgh.
Private enterprise and antitrust laws
State governments tried to regulate the railroads but were pushed aside when the Supreme Court ruled in the Wabash Cases (1886) that states can’t regulate interstate commerce, meaning that the states had to keep their hands off any business that worked between two or more states.
Congress knew it had to do something, so it passed the Interstate Commerce Act (1887). This legislation set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Although the ICC didn’t have much power to take on the powerful railroads, it at least established the principle that the public has an interest in private enterprise that the government has a duty to protect.
Besides the transportation companies, a number of other virtual monopoly trusts like steel and telephones took advantage of the public. To deal with companies so big that they stopped competition, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890). The term antitrust law has persisted in the United States as what the rest of the world calls competition laws, designed to make sure that consumers get fair prices based on competition, not price-fixing by businesses.
Attacking the victims, the Anti-Trust Act was even used against union organization in its early days, until the Clayton Act stopped it in 1914 (see Chapter 16). As with the ICC, the Anti-Trust Act took years to stand up to business.
Hard Times and Labor Unions
Even with some brave efforts, the working face of America wasn’t what the founding fathers had imagined. The century started with Thomas Jefferson’s dream of independent farmers creating a democratic utopia and ended with most of America working for other people.
During the last 20 years of the 1800s, several hundred thousand unskilled workers a year landed on America’s shores, looking for work. This influx of workers made it easy for bosses to hire people at low wages — pay so low that whole families had to work, kids included.
Child labor went on until the 1930s, when photographs of children as young as 8 in dangerous jobs, taken by pioneering documentary photographer Lewis Hine (1910), finally made the government take action. Some employers took advantage of workers, charging them high prices in company stores and threatening them if they tried to organize.
Labor-union organizations grew as a result of bad treatment and low wages. The Knights of Labor (see Chapter 14) had close to 1 million members by 1886. Terence Powderly of the Knights denounced multimillionaire businessmen for “laying the foundation for their colossal fortunes on the bodies and souls of living men.”
A demonstration in that year in Chicago’s Haymarket Square turned to violence when a bomb was thrown, killing a policeman. Eight union leaders were arrested. Even though no evidence showed that any of the leaders had anything to do with the bomb, five were sentenced to death and three to stiff prison terms.
Association with violence, even though the Knights of Labor didn’t cause it, cooled support for the organization. When a new organization of skilled workers called the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was formed later that year, it gradually took over the union fight from the Knights. AFL President Samuel Gompers concentrated only on skilled workers and knew how to work within the system to improve the position of working people gradually.
Question: What kind of labor unions made up the AFL?
Answer: Only skilled worker labor unions were admitted to the AFL.
Coxeys Army (1894), a small band of determined protestors, marched across the country to Washington, D.C., to demand jobs and federal help. During the Pullman strike (1894), in which workers blocked the railroad tracks to protest cuts in pay without cuts in company-housing rent, federal troops moved in against striking laborers for the first time. Union leader Eugene Debs, realizing that the system had to change, later ran for president.
For the time being, big business and big government appeared to have joined to keep poor people in their place. When William Jennings Bryan ran against William McKinley in 1896, the conservatives triumphed decisively. People with jobs and unmortaged farms didn’t want to take a chance of losing them to free silver and free trade. The Dingley Tariff Bill (1897) made imported goods cost more than ever, so that domestic industries could charge more without foreign competition. Gold stayed the standard, but new gold discoveries in Alaska, Canada, and elsewhere helped the money supply. The causes of women, workers, and blacks slowly edged toward acceptance in the public mind.
Question: What was the cause of the Pullman strike?
Answer: Pullman cut workers’ pay without a corresponding cut in workers’ rent.
Hard times for farmers, too
Major machinery became available to farmers in the 1880s. If you had a place big enough that you could afford it, a single machine could plow, plant, and work the seeds into the soil. The amazing combine coupled a machine that cut grain with another machine that threshed the grain off the stems and into bags, ready to sell. People don’t become farmers because they like to do high finance, and a lot of landowners got caught in a financial squeeze by over-borrowing and overproduction.
Pushed by the banks and exploited by big business, farmers fought back in almost every way they could, trying to regulate railroads, organize cooperatives, form a political party, and even inflate the currency. But they never did what the trusts did every day: limited production to raise prices. That strategy would have taken more organization and trust than independent farmers could muster.
Question: What did farmers do to improve their financial situation?
Answer: They tried to lower railroad charges, organize production cooperatives, and get political help. Unlike monopoly capitalists, however, they never held down supply to increase demand and price.
Because more land and better farm equipment were available, the price that farmers got paid for a bushel of wheat fell from $1 at the time of the Civil War to 50 cents in 1890. Loans that farmers had taken out to grow more wheat cost twice as much wheat to repay.
Meanwhile, the nation got used to paying cheap prices for beautiful California produce, harvested by poorly paid Mexican and Chinese labor, and shipped east in the railroads’ new refrigerator cars. Small family farmers went deeper into debt.
Question: How did farms change in size and equipment in the late 1800s?
Answer: More and bigger farms were available, with better equipment.
Farmers' “party” with laborers
Farmers joined with laborers to support cheap money and progressive causes through the Greenback Labor Party (1878) and the Populist Party (1892). Neither party won the presidency, but each polled as much as 10 percent of the votes and elected enough legislators to sway the Democrats in their direction.
Third parties have played a big part in American history; don’t get them confused. Here’s a rundown of major third parties in the 1800s:
● In 1832, the Anti-Masonic Party, seeking the eradication of the Freemasons and other secret societies from the United States, received a few votes.
● In 1848, the Free Soil Party, a precursor of the Republican Party, nominated former President Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate, splitting the vote in New York and causing the election of Zachary Taylor.
● In 1856, parts of the disintegrating Whig Party teamed up with the Know-Nothing Party, which opposed foreign immigration. Even as a team, the parties came in third behind Democrat James Buchanan and John C. Fremont of the newly formed Republican Party.
● In 1860, four major candidates ran for president, including candidates from the breakaway Southern Democratic Party and the last-ditch-compromise Constitutional Union Party. Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected with only 39 percent of the vote and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states.
● In 1892, the Populist Party won 22 electoral votes and 8.6 percent of the popular vote. The Democratic Party eventually adopted many Populist Party positions, making this contest a good example of a delayed vote for change.
Settling the West: The End of Wide-Open Spaces?
Settlers rode the railroads to new homes in the West as American Indians were driven out of their wide-open country to try to survive on confined reservations. Said one American Indian, “The antelope have gone; the buffalo wallows are empty. . . . We are like birds with a broken wing.”
James Earle Fraser’s famous End of the Trail (1915), an image of an American Indian on horseback with bowed head and downcast lance, was reproduced so many times that it seemed to symbolize the end of wide-open-spaces freedom for urbanized settlers as well as the free life of Great Plains American Indians.
In one of the few times a professional historian actually made history, Frederick Turner gave a speech called “The Significance of the Frontier in the American History” at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Turner said that the American character was formed by the possibilities of the open frontier — a frontier, he announced, that was closing.
Maybe it was time to get powdered wigs and start dancing the minuet again. Actually, the frontier was as much a state of mind as a place. At the same time Turner was announcing the end of the West, the government was creating permanently open land with the world’s first national parks in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Sequoia. These preserves were the first of hundreds of national parks and forests.
Pressure on American Indians
Even American Indians’ small reservations were threatened under the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), which tried to break up tribes and split up land for ownership by individual American Indian families. By 1900, American Indian tribes had lost more than half of the limited land onto which they’d been crowded 20 years before. Native families were forced to accept private allotments of poor land on which they’d be separated from their tribal culture. When this resulted in surplus land, the government sold it off at bargain prices to settlers.
The shortsighted policy of trying to make American Indians into settler farmers on land that wouldn’t support crops lasted until the American Indian New Deal of the 1930s recognized American Indians as full U.S. citizens. One last American Indian massacre occurred in 1890, however, when federal troops opened fire with machine guns on American Indians gathering for a sacred dance at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, killing 200 men, women, and children.
From a low of fewer than 250,000 American Indians at the close of the Western frontier in 1890, the U.S. American Indian population rebounded to 1.5 million urban and rural American Indians by 2000.
Question: What was the main policy of the United States toward American Indians from 1877 to the New Deal?
Answer: To break up tribes and give individual American Indians their own land.
Helen Jackson's Ramona
People who fought for American Indian rights included Helen Jackson, who wrote the factual story of mistreatment in A Century of Dishonor (1881) and then the popular novel Ramona (1884).
Ramona is the story of a part-American Indian, part-Scottish girl in California. With black hair and blue eyes, Ramona is reared in a privileged ranch family until she falls in love with the poor son of an American Indian chief. The book sold 600,000 copies and spawned plays, movies, and even towns.
People loved the story so much that they named buildings for Ramona; localities competed with claims to be the inspiration for her homeland. Unfortunately, the story missed its immediate goal of winning widespread sympathy for the plight of American Indians; instead, it touched off the American love of Spanish mission architecture that lives on today in many Mexican restaurants. Ramona did encourage the trend toward thinking of the defeated American Indians as being somehow noble and worthy of humane treatment. Long after the story was forgotten, its meaning moved society.
Backing Paper Money with Precious Metals
After the California gold rush that began in 1849 and lasted into the 1850s came the Nevada Silver bonanza of the 1860s. Scattered gold and silver discoveries also popped up in other Western states. All this glittering metal allowed the U.S. Treasury to back paper money with gold by 1879 (see Chapter 14).
The many senators who represented the few people living in the low-population, high-treasure West pushed for the government to buy more precious metal. This push combined with the belief of debt-ridden workers and farmers that money based on silver would ease their woes by making loans easier to repay with inflated cheap money (see Chapter 14).
At the Democratic Party convention in 1896, presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan made his famous “cross of gold” speech, which emotionally compared the Republicans, who demanded money tied only to gold, to the Romans who crucified Jesus. Poor people were elated; rich people were horrified. Backed by middle-class fear and upper-class financing, the Republicans easily beat Bryan.
Question: What was William Jennings Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech?
Answer: Delivered to the Democratic convention that nominated him for president, the speech called for the inflationary use of silver money to keep poor people from being crucified by golden hard money on the bankers’ “cross of gold.”
Being the Nicest Imperialist
As the 1800s drew to a close, America was bursting at the seams. It had been the longest time in U.S. history without a war, and the country needed something to distract itself from its economic troubles. The European powers were in a final imperialistic feeding frenzy, gobbling up bits of Africa and Asia they’d overlooked before.
Could the United States, founded on anticolonialism, stay out of the game? As the Washington Post editorialized, “The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood is in the jungle.” Some people believed social Darwinism proved that the United States must rule because it could rule.
The old Monroe Doctrine (see Chapter 11) got enforced in 1896 when the United States offered to mediate in a conflict between Venezuela and Britain on the border of British colony British Guiana in South America. After blowing America off at first, the British got all friendly and agreeable when they found themselves up to their knees in the Boer War in Africa. Score one for the United States.
Annexing Hawaii
Hawaii had been flirting with the United States since it became a whaling supply station in the early 1800s and the site of a major American missionary effort. Thanks to missionaries, Hawaii actually had the first printing press west of the Mississippi. Thanks to the king of Hawaii,
John Sutter founded Sacramento (and touched off the gold rush) with the help of Hawaiian workers. The sons of the first missionaries planted sugar cane, and the Hawaiian government granted Pearl Harbor to the United States as a naval base.
When the McKinley Tariff made it more expensive to sell Hawaiian sugar in the United States, the American sugar planters in Hawaii had an easy solution. They deposed Queen Liliuokalani and asked to be admitted to the United States; Hawaii wouldn’t be subject to the tariff if it were part of the United States. For five years, the United States held Hawaii off as a point of honor — it didn’t want to be associated with land-grabbing. With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, the United States got over the honor thing and annexed Hawaii.
Fighting the Spanish-American War
Sugar also made problems in Cuba when high U.S. import duties caused fewer sales and more hardship for the sugar workers. The workers rose in revolt against the Spanish colonial government, which suppressed them severely.
The United States was sympathetic to the workers’ plight, and yellow journalists egged the country on toward war with Spain. Sensational newspaperman William Randolph Hearst sent famous Western artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to draw pictures of the atrocities. When Remington cabled that conditions weren’t bad enough for a war, Hearst cabled back, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
Losing the battleship Maine
At the worst possible time for the Spanish, the U.S. battleship Maine, which had been sent to Cuba on a goodwill visit, blew up in Havana harbor. Four independent investigations over the past 100 years have come to four different conclusions about what caused the explosion, but at the time everybody but the Spanish believed that Spain had torched it. Congress voted to invade Cuba, but also passed the Teller Amendment (1898), which promised to free Cuba after the island was free of the Spanish.
Using some tricky fighting, the United States first attacked the Spanish not in Cuba but in Spain’s Philippine Islands colony, halfway around the world. The U.S. fleet sailed into Manila harbor, pulverized the Spanish fleet, and then sat around sweltering through the tropical summer, waiting for American troops to get there and take the islands. With the help of Filipino insurrectionists, the American army made short work of the Spanish troops.
Cuba was the same story. The American navy smashed the Spanish without losing a ship, and the American army, with Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders, quickly defeated the Spanish troops. The army still had a few Civil War veterans from 33 years before;
Northerners and Southerners felt good about fighting on the same side.
Letting Cuba go but keeping the rest
To end the one-sided Spanish-American War, Spain agreed to give the United States control of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The United States, feeling a little guilty, generously kicked in $20 million for the Philippines, because they were kind of a bonus for freeing Cuba. Puerto Rico came as a free bonus, which America decided to keep.
U.S. expansionism at the end of the 1800s is a natural stopping place for any essay discussion on Manifest Destiny you may have to undertake on AP U.S. History game day. Remember: Imperialism is keeping colonies; expansionism is adding land that becomes a real part of the mother country. With the Philippines free, Hawaii a territory, and Puerto Rico regularly voting to stay with the United States, the end of the United States’ 1890s overseas adventures came out as expansionism.
The United States set Cuba free as promised, keeping only a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, which was a little bigger than Manhattan. Having cleaned its clock once, the United States felt free to intervene in Cuba any time it wanted until Fidel Castro took power in 1958.
Fighting in the Philippines
The Philippines were trickier. European countries, especially Germany, were still sniffing around the world for colonies. The United States decided to keep the Philippines for a few years to add some schools and roads and stuff. That meant fighting a bloody war against the same Filipino revolutionaries who had just finished helping America get rid of the Spanish.
The Philippines conflict lasted for five years and led to the deaths of thousands of soldiers on both sides and hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The United States finally freed the Philippines in 1946, after World War II.
Rebelling against the idea of empire
The U.S. flirtation with empire, especially keeping the Philippines, was opposed by a lot of Americans, including Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, former President Grover Cleveland, Jane Addams, and the presidents of Harvard and Stanford universities.
Eventually, the imperialist eagle came to rest with the release of Cuba and the Philippines; Puerto Rico and Hawaii were mostly cool about staying part of the United States. As the United States increasingly became a Big Dog world power, the temptation to push smaller nations around never went away.
Question: What was the biggest controversy following the Spanish-American War?
Answer: Americans debated whether freedom-loving America had any right to keep the Philippine Islands unfree, as a colony.